Category Archives: backtoschool

Eavesdropping on MLA

I spent two years in graduate school, getting an MFA in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, which I wrapped up last fall. I was older than most of…

Raymond Chandler vs. Edmund Wilson

In a letter dated October 2, 1946, Raymond Chandler wrote: I suppose you read a bookseller our here was convicted of selling indecency in Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County….

goodbye Julie Granum

One of my first posts about grad school included the note that Julie Granum “is a fine poet.” I didn’t know Julie. I didn’t know that wearing tank tops in…

the backwards academic

Why is it that in the sciences, universities try to move forward, and in the humanities, they seem obsessed with looking back? I’m considering applying to PhD programs in creative…

Student loans: deadly?

Even with funding, graduate school is hard to manage without student loans. (Really, could you live on $14K a year?) So we all juggle our money and cross our fingers…

Fiction and lies

My workshop teacher this term, Chuck Kinder, started us off with two packets of Raymond Carver readings. As Chuck isn’t just a Carver fan — he was also a good…

There goes the living room

Now I have to unplug the modem. Next stop: undetermined, somewhere along the 15.

goodbye cruel stove

That’s not fair, really. The stove has been absolutely wonderful. The only thing cruel about it is that I have to leave it behind, and it’s pink, entirely glowingly pink….

The Crying of Our Ecstatic Days

The cool new MetaxuCafe, all-litblogs, all-the-time, has decided to let me post about literary podcasts. I should post there very soon. I should also post a new literary podcast in…

To MFA or not to MFA

Sam Sacks glancingly reviews Best New American Voices 2006 and quite reasonably takes MFA programs to the mat. Some, like The Elegant Variation, call these programs meatgrinders. The Literary Saloon…